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Spreadsheet with S.S. and Civics resources in response January 6.

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Google Apps and Other Education Apps

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NJSLS 2020 Social Studies presentation (pdf)

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NJSLS 2020 Social Studies presentation (pdf)

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resources hyperlinks

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2020 New Jersey Student Learning Standards Implementation

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NJSLS in Social Studies presentation with notes

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NJSLS in Social Studies presentation with notes

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Explore the 2020 NJSLS in Social Studies

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Explore the 2020 NJSLS in Social Studies

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recorded webinar

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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Reopening Schools in a time of Uncertainty:  Insights for District Leaders

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Reopening Schools in a time of Uncertainty:  Insights for District Leaders

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Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

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Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms. Founded in 2011, Zoom helps businesses and organizations bring their teams together in a frictionless environment to get more done.

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2020

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Guide to Creating Questions for Close Analytic Reading (2).doc

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NJDOE SGO Overview Presentation May 2013.pdf

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PARCC preparation practice

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PrepFactory.com - Interactive test prep technology + affordable one-on-one tutoring!

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Interactive ACT + SAT prep technology and affordable, live one-on-one online tutoring!

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The making of North America (map, video)
(geography, social studies, science)

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Making North America | Interactive Map

Discover how North America took its shape by visiting geological sites across the continent, searching for clues in the landscape, and viewing episodes from the broadcast series Making North America, in this interactive produced by NOVA. In Expedition, hunt for clues that help explain how geological forces shaped North America, find artifacts that reveal how the landscape influenced life, and search for evidence that exposes how humans turned rocks into riches. In Explore, click on map pins to study landscapes and watch video clips that cover relevant science topics. In Watch, stream the series' three episodes: Origins, Life, and Human. This resource is part of the NOVA: Making North America Collection.

This interactive activity requires Adobe Flash Player.

Visit the program page here.

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Discover how North America took its shape by visiting geological sites across the continent, searching for clues in the landscape, and viewing episodes from the broadcast series Making North America, in this interactive produced by NOVA.

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Education Week: What's Wrong with the Common Core Testing?  Maybe Nothing

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Education Week: What's Wrong with the Common Core Testing?  Maybe Nothing

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It's very unlikely that the flattening of student test scores in states using the Smarter Balanced assessment in 2016-17 is due to technical problems with the exam, the group's leadership concluded in a new report released Wednesday.

In February, Curriculum Matters brought you the details of a debate about the meaning of the largely flat scores on the exam, given that year in 13 states.

At the time, some critics questioned whether those results genuinely reflected a stall in student achievement, or whether it pointed to serious issues in the test. Perhaps, they said, Smarter Balanced didn't include enough test questions to measure the full range of student skills.

Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium officials promised to examine this question in a series of technical analyses.

Essentially, consortium wonks took samples of results from the states that administered the exam and analyzed them to see whether they lined up with expected scores. They also looked at how the test items "performed"-whether they were as easy or hard as field tests indicated.

They've now released their results of their analyses. Warning: the 30-page report is pretty technical. Have a testing expert on speed-dial if you decide to brave it. (SBAC also put out a much shorter summary.)

Here are the most important takeaways:

Mean test scores were down in most grades for English/language arts, and most steeply in 5th grade English/language arts. In math, they fell for all secondary grades, but rose for the primary grades. Overall, however, these are very small changes, and it's not clear how meaningful they are in terms of measuring learning.

SBAC enlarged the pool of computer-scored test questions by half in ELA, and about a third in math, for the 2016-17 administration.

These new questions were generally easier than the "old" questions, which contradicts the theory that scores were flat because the test had too many difficult questions. Importantly, because the test adapts to students' achievement levels, having more easy questions in the pool doesn't necessarily mean that students got an "easier" test overall.

Students did tend to do slightly less well on these new test questions than on older test items. These differences were small overall, though, and don't seem to explain the bigger-picture achievement patterns. Grades and subjects with the highest performance differences between old and new test items didn't neatly line up with the grades and subjects that saw mean score declines.

Student performance differed by test question type. In math, students tended to do better on computer-scored items than on the "performance tasks"-multi-stage problems worth several points and scored by hand-and in ELA, they did better on performance tasks than on the computer-scored questions.

Looking across this data, SBAC officials conclude that the test was functioning as it was designed to do, and that the 2016-17 results are an accurate description of what students in those states knew and could do when they took the test.

In addition, an outside reviewer from the Center for Assessment, a New Hampshire-based test-consulting group, largely agreed with the SBAC analysis.

So just how are we supposed to interpret the flat scores for 2016-17? That's trickier.

The data suggests that some of the early gains on the test, in the 2014-15 and 2015-16 years, were probably partly the result of students simply becoming more familiar with the exam format. This is essentially the "plateau effect," a term testing experts use to describe the initial boost followed by a drop-off in scores.

But the strong performance on the ELA performance tasks could also indicate more teaching in alignment with the Common Core's focus on citing evidence in reading and writing.

SBAC said it will establish "additional procedures to monitor and potentially discriminate better between growth due to increased familiarity with the test and true improvement in student learning."
Image: Getty Don't miss another Curriculum Matters post. Sign up here to get news alerts in your email inbox.

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What's Wrong With the Common-Core Tests? Maybe Nothing, Analysis Says

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It's very unlikely that the flattening of student test scores in states using the Smarter Balanced assessment in 2016-17 is due to technical problems with the exam, the group's leadership concluded in a new report released Wednesday.

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CAR Framework, yearly units for grades k-12

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The instructional units for English Language Arts (ELA) in grades kindergarten through 12 can serve to facilitate conversations regarding assessment and curriculum development. Experienced educators designed the instructional units by considering which standards might be grouped together to maximize a student's educational experience in ELA. While the instructional units have an order and arrangement, local districts have the flexibility to modify them to fit the needs of their student population. For example, though all student learning objectives (SLOs) appear only once, a district could modify the units to repeat the inclusion of one or more SLOs to ensure mastery.

If your district is using the Connected Action Roadmap (CAR) approach to curriculum development, you will find the standards and SLOs in the English Language Arts CAR templates on the left-hand side bar.

These instructional units were developed using the CAR framework, a tool for instructional improvement. Both are part of a larger toolkit the Department is developing, in collaboration with partner associations and organizations, to assist all districts to deliver high-quality, standards-based curriculum, instruction and assessment. Although the tools are available free of charge, school districts are not mandated to use them. Instead, school districts are free to choose, and use, the tools that they feel are best suited for the success of the students they serve.

Kindergarten

First Grade

Second Grade

Third Grade

Fourth Grade

Fifth Grade

Sixth Grade

Seventh Grade

Eighth Grade

Ninth and Tenth Grades

Eleventh and Twelfth Grades

Archive

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Instructional Units for English Language Arts

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The instructional units for English Language Arts (ELA) in grades kindergarten through 12 can serve to facilitate conversations regarding assessment and curriculum development. Experienced educators designed the instructional units by considering which standards might be grouped together to maximize a student's educational experience in ELA.

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E.L.   Giving Students the Right Kind of Writing Practice

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E.L.   Giving Students the Right Kind of Writing Practice

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April 2018 | Volume 75 | Number 7
Learning to Write, Writing to Learn Pages 14-20

Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle

Does the following scenario sound familiar?

The school year starts, and teachers open up the district's pacing guide, turn to the first quarter, and see that it is time to teach the narrative essay. They then spend weeks teaching kids to write one narrative essay. When that unit is over, they flip forward in the pacing guide and find that it's now time to teach the argument essay. They then spend weeks helping students to write one argument essay. And so on. All year, each teacher faithfully follows the pacing guide, and when the end of the school year arrives, students have written one essay in each of the genres typical of student writing assignments.

We reject this approach.

After 66 combined years in the classroom (Kelly teaching high school in California and Penny in New Hampshire), we know this: If a student only writes "big" essays, she is not getting enough practice to improve significantly. This pathway doesn't provide enough practice for writers-especially in districts where the pacing guide calls for teaching only four essays a year (a different genre in each quarter or, worse, one literary essay after another). Writing four major essays simply doesn't offer enough time immersed in the art of crafting words and sentences. Improvement in writing is grounded in practice, in getting words on the page-lots of them. There are no shortcuts. A "four big essays approach" stifles young writers. Worse, it ensures they will never become excellent writers.

But What Kind of Practice?

Conversely, as consultants who have worked across the United States, we have been in schools where students are getting lots of practice, writing an essay each month. However, in many of these classrooms, students practice the same form (the five-paragraph formula essay) repeatedly, which robs them of the ability to develop their own voice and agency as writers. It denies them the crucial experience of organizing their thinking. Repeating the same task may make them more fluent writers, but it will not make them better writers. Young writers don't just need practice; they need the right kind of practice.

So what kind of practice do students need? One way to answer this question is to consider how students might learn to write a good short story. The two of us put our heads together recently and designed a narrative unit based on Jerome Bruner's cognitive learning theory, in which he called for a "spiral" curriculum. (A spiral curriculum is a course of study in which students will revisit the same topics or skills, with each encounter increasing in complexity and reinforcing what has been previously learned.) We then each taught this unit to our high school English students, moving through the unit at the same time (though on opposite ends of the United States). Our students did some reading and writing "together" as they progressed, sharing their thinking via both Google Docs and Flipgrid.

Bruner believed that students benefit from revisiting a task several times, having the opportunity to wrestle with increasing complexity with each new visit to the task. We don't learn something complex like writing a good story all at once; we learn incrementally. We learn when we scaffold new learning upon old learning. So if our students were going to learn to write excellent stories, we reasoned, they would need to take several laps through the genre-laps that build in an increasingly sophisticated progression of skills.

Multiple Laps Through a Genre

The two of us shaped the unit so students would create a series of texts that require a progression of skills. We think of this process as taking laps around a track, and each time one circles around, the complexity of the task increases. Completing multiple laps in a genre or discourse not only ensures that our students' writing volume will significantly increase, it also leads them to deeper understanding and increased confidence in their ability to craft complex texts.

Figure 1 shows the laps our students took through a nine-week study of narrative writing we developed. Our young writers got repeated practice with skills we know are essential for writing sophisticated narratives.

Source: Excerpt from 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle. Copyright © 2018 by James Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle. Published by Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH. Reprinted by permission of the Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Notice first that we anchor our teaching of writing in a high volume of reading. As Frank Smith famously said:

All the nuts and bolts of writing-including spelling, punctuation, and grammar, but more importantly the subtle style and structure of written discourse, the appropriate organization of sentences and paragraphs, and the appropriate selection of words and tones of voice-are learned through reading. The point deserves emphasis. You learn to read by reading and you learn to write by reading (p. 118).

Students must read many stories while they study story. We are certain that unless all teachers increase the volume of students' reading, we will never see the gains we seek in our students' writing.

Also note that on the progression of skills, we identify the kinds of texts students will write in each lap and also project how much time they'll need to complete each lap. At the beginning of the unit, we give students a "road map" plan for the laps they will take and the skills they will be asked to demonstrate with each piece of writing. We connect the critical habits characteristic of all writing with the skills of the specific genre we are studying. The skills detailed in the unit plan are a lot to take in at once, but we believe students are empowered when they understand that learning to write well in any genre involves mastering a progression of skills.

Let's take a look at each lap we have students complete in writing a narrative, including how many days we spend on each lap.

Lap One: Swimming in Short Memoirs (One Week)

In this first lap, we use poetry to invite students to write each day in their notebooks. We begin by reading Billy Collins's poem "On Turning Ten" to elicit memories of birthdays and childhood. Both of us, as we begin this week, open our own notebooks and model jotting notes about how Collins's words remind us of our own friendships, family memories, or favorite places. We list a few ideas and begin drafting out the story of one, writing in front of our students as they write in their notebooks. This few minutes of daily practice in finding ideas and writing about them increases the volume of ungraded writing practice, a key component in building student confidence. Putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) daily is essential, regardless of the genre we're teaching.

Our willingness to model our thinking as we draft in front of our students also helps them to understand the messiness of re-reading and revising. Writing teachers must write. Their first responsibility is to show learners that writing is interesting, possible, and worthwhile. For this to occur, teachers must regularly model their own writing process.

After several days of practice, we start small by asking students to select one idea and write a 100-word memoir that focuses on two skills: using sensory details and choosing strong verbs to evoke images.

For instance, Kelly's student Cassandra wrote:

It was already seven o'clock and the annual party had just started. My face was painted sugar-skull white. The backyard was purely lit with twinkling white lights hanging across the patio and swirling around the maple trees. The tables were filled with sweet Day-of-the-Dead treats: pan dulce, pan de muerto, tamales, champurrados, and buñuelos. An altar stood alone in the center of the party. Pictures of our past loved ones were displayed. Sugar skulls, tissue paper flowers and marigolds or flor de muerto scattered the tables. Instead of grieving their deaths, we spend our evening celebrating our loved ones.

Lap Two: Crafting One Scene (One Week)

A scene is a moment in time. It most often includes three elements: the use of specific, sensory detail to slow down action; the use of dialogue to develop characters and situations; and the use of a strong narrator voice. Our students don't write an entire story during this week; they write one moment in a story. We model this by having them study numerous mentor texts, and when it's time to draft, we support students by writing and thinking alongside them.

A scene can be as short as half a page of writing, which allows us to narrow the focus of our teaching in studying mentor texts and working or conferencing with individual students. Here's how Penny's student Sara began her scene:

The car ride was nauseating, trees stood tall around the road leading us to a long secluded driveway, everything seems still, the grass long but unmoving, the rocks simply existing, the signs lining the gray tar screaming "Correctional Facility" in bold, black letters, reminding me where I am and why, and as the building comes into view, I am still, still as the grey blocks before me, still as the few parked cars in the large lot, I feel sick again, the sight of towering metal fences protected by layers and layers of sharp barbed wire making me dizzy. Looking to the heavy doors at the top of what seems to be countless concrete stairs, I become alive, I start moving, hoping my brother is in there doing the same thing.

In a conference, Penny celebrated Sara's use of clear images and a strong narrator's voice. She recognized that this student was testing sentence boundaries by imitating an intentional run-on sentence from a mentor text in order to flood the reader with images.

When asked about dialogue, Sara noted, "I didn't include it because there was nothing left to say." Reflecting on this student-teacher exchange reminded both of us why conferences matter. When we listen to students, we understand what they know and how they are working to craft meaning, both in images and with punctuation. We want our students to understand that punctuation decisions move beyond correctness and often influence a reader's engagement with the text.

Lap Three: Crafting Several Scenes to Tell a Story (Three Weeks)

Next, we ask students to create a series of scenes that tell a story. We begin by studying the shape of stories. In doing so, we analyze a series of skills that build on what students learned in the first two laps. We have students notice how a scene can either slow down time or build momentum, and we note how dialogue reveals character through what is said-or not said. As we point out in mini-lessons or conferences, writers use detail to direct the reader's focus. Careful word choice affects the narrator's voice.

Lastly, we focus on how writers create compelling endings. We study how expert writers craft their stories. Studying an anchor text like Stephen King's "The Man in the Black Suit" helps our students emulate the moves good writers make.

We don't give our students formulas for organizing their stories. Throughout the teaching of this unit, we generally personalize our teaching through individual conferences to help students plan and shape their drafts. Sometimes, we reteach necessary skills to certain students.

For example, consider how Penny subtly helped Sara keep going and creating. Sara was serious about developing this story of her brother's incarceration. At one point, she asked Penny, "Will you read this? I don't know where to go next." Both of us, as we shared Sara's developing work and consulted about it, could feel what it cost her to write this from-life story. Each detail of her recent visit to prison breathed tension. This was Sara's story, and we expected her to make decisions about her own work.

Penny responded by saying: "How brave of you to write this. Your next move depends on the story you want to tell. You could flash back to scenes of the two of you growing up. Or you could shift the focus to you and how his incarceration has impacted your first years in high school. You decide." After this interchange, Sara began puzzling over her plan in her notebook.

Educators guide students toward independence when they focus their teaching on the deliberate progression of skills, coupled with an expectation that students will make their own decisions about the organization of their writing. Sara became a stronger writer as she applied what she learned about scene writing in lap two to her complex story of a sibling relationship now strained by distance. We could see her becoming ready to take on that challenge.

Lap Four: Using Multiple Narrators to Craft a Story (Three Weeks)

This fourth lap allows teachers to differentiate instruction. At this point in our unit, some of our students still struggled with crafting several effective scenes to tell a story. These students repeated lap three to gain the additional practice necessary to write effective stories. Our more advanced writers moved on to writing stories told through the lens of multiple narrators-a level of complexity they never would have attempted in a classroom where students only write one narrative essay before moving on to the next genre.

Why Narrative?

We start our year teaching narrative because students have stories to tell and we value these stories. When students' voices are heard, they more readily engage in the hard work. This is not task-oriented writing, where students dutifully answer a mandated prompt. We seek their individual voices and come to know them as they write several stories in this unit. Students build confidence as writers because they have the opportunity to revisit and to practice the same skills over time.

The unit described here focuses on moves in narrative writing that anchor all modes of writing: using specificity of information or detail; establishing a credible voice; and organizing ideas with purpose. We've found that students are more likely to acquire these skills in a classroom where the teacher is writing, where the teacher is conferring, and where teacher and student together closely study mentor texts.

The approach we advocate here is decidedly different than simply taking students through one lap of writing in a given genre, one genre at a time. We have found that this spiral approach to teaching writing is much more likely to lead our students to mastery. And there is an added bonus: It also leads our students to rediscover the joys of writing. It teaches them that writing is interesting, possible, and worthwhile.

Author's note: All student names are pseudonyms.

Endnotes

Bruner, J. S. (1960). The process of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

For a fuller description of how we developed and taught this unit, see our book 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents. (2018, Heinemann).

Smith, F. (2006). Reading without nonsense, 4th ed. New York: Teachers College Press.

Kelly Gallagher ( kellygallagher.org) teaches at Magnolia High School in Anaheim, California. Penny Kittle ( pennykittle.net) teaches at Kennett High School in North Conway, New Hampshire. They are coauthors of 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents (Heinemann, 2018). Follow them on Twitter @KellyGToGo and @pennykittle.

KEYWORDS

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Giving Students the Right Kind of Writing Practice

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April 2018 | Volume 75 | Number 7 Learning to Write, Writing to Learn Pages 14-20 Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle Does the following scenario sound familiar? The school year starts, and teachers open up the district's pacing guide, turn to the first quarter, and see that it is time to teach the narrative essay.

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E.L. The Magic of Writing Stuff Down

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April 2018 | Volume 75 | Number 7
Learning to Write, Writing to Learn Pages 78-79

Bryan Goodwin

The latest business craze seems like a throwback to a bygone era. Basically, it's writing stuff down. Google "Bullet Journals" and you'll see that within a few years of Rydell Carroll introducing "BuJos," they've become all the rage. People are "discovering" the power of a neatly organized notebook to jot down notes, remind themselves of appointments, and create task lists. It's an "analog system for a digital age."

After years of filling legal pads, a few years back, I decided to go digital, putting my life into a software application that promised to sync my tasks, notes, and calendar into one giant, color-coded system. Instead, it became a monster to feed-never there when I needed it but pestering me with incessant reminders of overdue tasks. So, I recently came crawling back to the analog fold, finding new religion with my Bullet Journal. Now, my mind feels sharper, my days more focused, and my stress lessened as I put the messiness of my life back into neatly lined pages. This led me to wonder-does something magical happen when we write stuff down? Should we encourage students to embrace handwritten notes?

Writer Takes All

Let's look at some research. According to Beesley and Apthorp's meta-analysis (2010), showing students how to take effective notes is strongly correlated with better achievement. One study from 20 years ago (when computer notes would have been an unaffordable oddity) tested college students to see if taking notes supported retention of factual knowledge (Beeson, 1996). It did: the note-taking group scored better than a group who took no notes during the lecture, but later wrote essays about what they'd learned. The note-taking group also outscored a control group who reviewed the material but did no writing at all. In short, we're more apt to remember stuff we take notes on.

Enter the Laptop

The laptop seems like a perfect tool for taking notes. After all, most people can type faster than they can write and thus should be able to capture more of what's being said with less effort. Yet therein lies the problem. As it turns out, note taking isn't supposed to be easy-nor a transcription of classroom discourse. It's more important that learners actively engage in learning by considering the essence of what a speaker is saying and including that essence in their notes.

Recently, a team of researchers (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014) assessed whether Princeton University students comprehended and retained more information in lecture-based learning when taking notes by hand or by computer. Here's the key takeaway:

[L]aptop use can negatively affect performance on educational assessments, even-or perhaps especially-when the computer is used for its intended function of easier note taking. Although more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as is more likely the case on a laptop than when notes are taken longhand, the benefit disappears. ... [D]espite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good.

In short, students ought to shut their laptops and write stuff down.

At issue here seems to be something cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham (2003) has noted: "students remember ... what they think about." For students who are efficient typists, laptops may make it easy to mindlessly record what they hear, instead of thinking about what they're learning, mentally connecting dots and focusing on what's most important. Moreover, digital devices may tempt students to think about other things besides learning, like formatting or messages from friends.

The Benefits of Handwriting

The very act of handwriting appears to have important cognitive benefits. For example, a study of 15 children in Indiana (James & Engelhardt, 2012) who were asked to write, trace, or type letters while having their brains scanned found that writing letters activated more regions of the brain than typing letters-in particular, visual processing centers at the heart of perceiving letters. Because of these and other cognitive benefits of handwriting, occupational therapists Stevenson and Just (2014) concluded that it's best to hold off on teaching keyboarding to children until ages 10 to 12, after they've fully developed the ability to write by hand.

But what about computers as a writing aid for children with learning disabilities, who might benefit from being unburdened of the fine motor skills writing requires? Again, the easiest path isn't necessarily the most beneficial. Berninger and colleagues (2009) studied 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders with and without learning disabilities. They found that all groups wrote more words, and wrote them faster, by pen than by keyboard. The students with learning disabilities sometimes found it easier to touch a letter or form a word on a keyboard, but they composed text better with a pen. The take-away: Young children don't need computers to learn to write (except, of course, for children with disabilities that make it not possible for them to use a pen/pencil). If anything, computers seem to get in the way.

Consider This ...

For those who haven't been taking notes, let's review. Note taking is an effective memory and learning aid because it prompts students to think about their learning; it's more effective when done by hand; and young writers, even those with learning disabilities, aren't well served by moving too quickly to keyboarding.

So, does technology have a role to play in teaching writing? Sure. Many teachers, for example, report success with blogging and online journaling, which help kids collaborate and motivate them to improve their writing because students see themselves as "real" writers with an actual audience.

Yet we ought to consider something that often gets scant attention: what's going on in students' minds while they're learning. When we're clear about that, we can more easily consider whether a new gadget or digital platform will enhance or impede active learning-and when it might be time to put technology aside, encourage students to listen up, think about their learning, and write stuff down.

References

Beesley, A. D., & Apthorp, H. S. (2010). Classroom instruction that works, second edition: Research report. Denver, CO: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning.

Beeson, S. A. (1996). The effect of writing after reading on college nursing students' factual knowledge and synthesis of knowledge. Journal of Nursing Education, 35(6), 258-263.

Berninger, V. W., Abbot, R. D., Augsburger, A., & Garcia, N. (2009). Comparison of pen and keyboard transcription modes in children with and without learning disabilities. Learning Disability Quarterly, 32(3), 123-141.

James, K. H., & Engelhardt, L. (2012). The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 1(1), 32-42.

Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168.

Stevenson, N. C., & Just, C. (2014). In early education, why teach handwriting before keyboarding? Early Childhood Education Journal, 42(1), 49-56.

Willingham, D. (2003). Students remember ... what they think about. American Educator, 27(2), 37-41.

Bryan Goodwin is president and CEO of McREL International, Denver, Colorado. He is the lead author of Balanced Leadership for Powerful Learning (ASCD, 2015).

KEYWORDS

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The Magic of Writing Stuff Down - Educational Leadership

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April 2018 | Volume 75 | Number 7 Learning to Write, Writing to Learn Pages 78-79 Bryan Goodwin The latest business craze seems like a throwback to a bygone era. Basically, it's writing stuff down. Google "Bullet Journals" and you'll see that within a few years of Rydell Carroll introducing "BuJos," they've become all the rage.

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Jungle Jeopardy: An Ecosystem Game

Players strive to create a balanced rainforest ecosystem in which each animal has enough food to survive over a period of 12 days, in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING. Players see how the different species of plants and animals in a rainforest depend on one another. They also experiment with how changing the amount of one resource affects the whole ecosystem.

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Players strive to create a balanced rainforest ecosystem in which each animal has enough food to survive over a period of 12 days, in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING. Players see how the different species of plants and animals in a rainforest depend on one another.

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The following link will bring you to the PARCC site with resources and samples of questions for various grade levels from the Spring 2017 PARCC assessment

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Keeping Assessment Relevant and "Authentic" video

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Keeping Assessment Relevant and "Authentic" video

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Edutopia. An enlightening video on using assessments in class so kids feel engaged, are challenged, and relevant.

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NASA's

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Our solar system has one star, eight planets, five officially recognized dwarf planets, at least 290 moons, more than 1.3 million asteroids, and about 3,900 comets.

It is located in an outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy called the Orion Arm, or Orion Spur. Our solar system orbits the center of the galaxy at about 515,000 mph (828,000 kph). It takes about 230 million years to complete one orbit around the galactic center.

We call it the solar system because it is made up of our star, the Sun, and everything bound to it by gravity - the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune; dwarf planets Pluto, Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris - along with hundreds of moons; and millions of asteroids, comets, and meteoroids.

Our solar system is the only one we know of that has a planet that supports life. So far, we only know of life on Earth, but we're looking for life on other worlds.

NASA's Europa Clipper

Send Your Name to Jupiter

You're invited to #SendYourName to Jupiter's moon Europa by signing a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón that will travel aboard NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft.

Saying Farewell: Which Spacecraft are Leaving Our Solar System?

Only two spacecraft have reached interstellar space, the space between stars. Three other spacecraft have achieved enough velocity to eventually travel beyond the boundaries of our solar system.

Voyager 1 went interstellar in 2012 and Voyager 2 joined it in 2018. Both spacecraft, launched in 1977, are still in communication with Earth.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is currently exploring an icy region beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt. It eventually will leave our solar system.

Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 also will ultimately travel silently among the stars toward the galactic core. The spacecraft used up their power supplies decades ago.

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Solar System Overview Our solar system has one star, eight planets, five officially recognized dwarf planets, at least 290 moons, more than 1.3 million asteroids, and about 3,900 comets. It is located in an outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy called the Orion Arm, or Orion Spur.

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A TED-Ed video to help students understand body odor.

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Google Arts & Culture

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Inspired by the National Gallery's landmark show 'The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Monet & Architecture'

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If you are looking to become Google Educator certified, or need to renew, look no further.

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"Grading Smarter, Not Harder" module 1 reading 1

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A great learning and assessment tool. Use for formative assessments, SGO pre / post assessments, and summative.

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The Rule of Eight: A Practical Playbook for First-Year Teachers

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The Rule of Eight: A Practical Playbook for First-Year Teachers

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Every Student is a Mathematics Language Learner

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Every Student is a Mathematics Language Learner

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There's a simple way to connect with a challenging student, according to " The Two-Minute Relationship Builder" from Education Update. Spend two minutes a day for 10 days having a personal conversation with the student. Talk about whatever topic interests him-sports, cars, family life, Legos, whatever-but keep discipline and academics off the table.

Lisa Kitzmann, a 3rd grade teacher in California, tried the strategy several times over the course of a year, and the results were surprising. As she developed a personal connection with the students she targeted, their behavior in the classroom improved-and so did her outlook.

"When you become closer with [children] who used to drive you absolutely crazy and you begin to understand why they're acting the way they are, your attitude changes," says Kitzmann.

The Two-by-Ten strategy is more than an icebreaker; it's a trust-building exercise that goes both ways. At first, it can be difficult to break through, Kitzmann admits, especially when students affect the mood of the classroom or interrupt the learning that's taking place. But by taking the time to really get to know the students, you can begin to uncover the reasons behind their misbehavior.

"Most often it is because [children] lack a sense of trust and respect for the adults who are supposed to be their role models or because they lack structure, routine, and discipline at home," says Kitzmann. "We often forget that children need just as much respect as adults do-and they are taught by actions."

By practicing Two-by-Ten, Kitzmann had the extra push to give her most disruptive students structured one-on-one time, and they responded by opening up to her on a whole new level. "When a child told me that he had to meet his dad at the police station for weekend visitation exchanges so his parents wouldn't fight, it made me much more understanding of his situation," she says. "He was dealing with grown-up issues and circumstances that were beyond his control. My sense of patience and self-motivation to instill safety for him in the classroom became more important than reaching him academically. The child had more to deal with than learning to write a complete sentence and not being disruptive. The only world he knows outside the classroom is a disruptive one."

As Kitzmann emphasized in her article in Education Update, "you begin to see the child in a different light" when you initiate conversations that go beyond "how are you today, nice to see you."

"Deeper conversations lead to a compassion that only comes when you invest your time, listening ears, and an open heart," says Kitzmann. "The difference is learning about what's in the inside of a child's heart and head-not just focusing on the external casual talk that seems easy. [Children] know when you truly take those extra minutes to talk about their feelings on a personal level."

For Kitzmann, Two-by-Ten wasn't the answer to classroom misbehavior, but it was a start.

Learn the dos and don'ts of the Two-by-Ten strategy in "The Two-Minute Relationship Builder," from Education Update.

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Two Minutes to Better Student Behavior - ASCD Inservice

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There's a simple way to connect with a challenging student, according to "The Two-Minute Relationship Builder" from Education Update. Spend two minutes a day for 10 days having a personal conversation with the student. Talk about whatever topic interests him-sports, cars, family life, Legos, whatever-but keep discipline and academics off the table.

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"Grading Smarter, Not Harder"  module 2, reading 1

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"Grading Smarter, Not Harder" module 3, reading 1

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"Grading Smarter, Not Harder" module 4, reading 1

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"Grading Smarter, Not Harder" module 5, reading 1

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"Grading Smarter, Not Harder" module 5, reading 1

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National Center for Transgender Equality

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GLSEN Safe Space Kit: Be an ALLY to LGBTQ Youth!

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Support LGBT students, educate about anti-LGBTQ bias, and advocate for positive changes in your school. Be a visible ally!

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Learn about the real action GLSEN is taking on the local, state and federal levels to make schools better and safer, and the policies proven to make a difference.

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Are you involved in school athletics or PE?If so, GLSEN wants to help you create a winning team by encouraging the principles of respect, safety and equal access for all students, teachers and coaches

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Grades 6-12

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Unheard Voices: Stories and Lessons for Grades 6-12

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GLSEN, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and StoryCorps have collaborated to create Unheard Voices, an oral history and curriculum project helping educators integrate lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history, people and issues into their instructional programs.

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Elementary

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We all want students to feel safe and respected and to develop respectful attitudes and behaviors. GLSEN developed Ready, Set, Respect! to provide tools to support elementary educators like you with these efforts. The kit provides a set of tools that will help you prepare to teach about respect and includes lesson plans that can help you seize teachable moments.

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Implicit Bias -- how it effects us and how we push through | Melanie Funchess | TEDxFlourCity

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N.J. Administrative Code Title 6A Chapter 14     Special Education

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N.J. Administrative Code Title 6A Chapter 14     Special Education

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Modeling

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New Jersey Student Learning Standards for Mathematics

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All grades

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Helping you to understand the Summative Assessments

The annual summative math tests are available in Grades 3-8 and high school. Students solve multi-step math problems that require reasoning and address real-world situations. This requires students to reason mathematically, make sense of quantities and their relationships to solve real-world problems, and show their understanding. Many previous assessments focused mostly on rote procedure only.

PARCC has released a set of test specification documents, including high-level assessment blueprints and evidence statement tables, to help educators and the general public better understand the design of the state summative assessments.

Performance-level descriptors describe what a typical student at each level should be able to demonstrate based on his/her command of grade-level standards.

Understanding Summative Assessment Design

Test specification documents help educators and the general public better understand the design of the PARCC mathematics summative assessments. These documents were updated in July 2015 based on the updated assessment design.

Mathematics High Level Blueprint

The Mathematics High Level Blueprint defines the total number of tasks and/or items for any given grade/course assessment, the item types, and the point values for each.

Mathematics Assessment Unit Structure

The Mathematics Assessment Unit Structure defines the structure for the mathematics assessments including the number of units, and the timing and calculator designation for each unit.

Claims Structure Documents

Claims Structure Documents define the master claim of the PARCC mathematics assessments as well as the four sub-claims in which student achievement will be measured.

Evidence Statement Tables and Evidence Statements

Evidence Statement Tables and Evidence Statements describe the knowledge and skills that an assessment item or a task elicits from students. These are aligned directly to the Common Core State Standards, and highlight their advances especially around the coherent nature of the standards.

Evidence Statements include information on "Clarifications, Limits and Emphasis," related "Mathematical Practices" and "Calculator Designations."

Evidence Statement Documents

​Informational Guides to the Summative Assessments in Mathematics

​Informational Guides to the Summative Assessments in Mathematics provide grade-level information about the design and structure of the state summative assessments. The guides:

Help educators understand the content in the summative assessment.

Inform instruction by indicating the content assessed by each task type as described by the Evidence Statements.

Describe policies for administering the tests.

Informational Guides by Grade

Mathematics Performance-Level Descriptors

Grades 3-11

PARCC reports results according to five performance levels that delineate the knowledge, skills, and practices students are able to demonstrate:

Level 1: Did not yet meet expectations

Level 2: Partially met expectations

Level 3: Approached expectations

Level 4: Met expectations

Level 5: Exceeded expectations

Performance level descriptors (PLDs) indicate what a typical student at each level should be able to demonstrate based on his/her command of grade-level standards. In mathematics, the performance levels at each grade level are written for each of four assessment sub-claims:

Major content

Additional and supporting content

Reasoning

Modeling

The performance levels within each claim area are differentiated by a number of factors consistent with the Common Core's inclusion of standards for both mathematical content and mathematical practices and PARCC's Cognitive Complexity Framework for Mathematics.

Download the framework:

Performance-Level Descriptors by Grade Band

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The annual summative math tests are available in Grades 3-8 and high school. Students solve multi-step math problems that require reasoning and address real-world situations. This requires students to reason mathematically, make sense of quantities and their relationships to solve real-world problems, and show their understanding.

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lessons and assessments

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History Lessons | Stanford History Education Group

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This curriculum teaches students how to investigate historical questions by employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading. Instead of memorizing historical facts, students evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on historical issues and learn to make historical claims backed by documentary evidence.

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Educational Companies offering Free online subscripts for school shut down

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Educational Companies offering Free online subscripts for school shut down

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In amongst a wave of email related to COVID-19 I found a message from my local Cisco contact (my school licenses their NetAcad program) that Webex is now free to any school that needs it to conduct classes online.

To support a quick transition to using Webex for classes, Cisco has published some short guides to getting started with Webex. There are guides made for teachers, guides made for students, and guides made for parents. The target audience for the student guides appears to be middle school age and older. All of the guides can be downloaded as PDFs.

For those who would like a little more guidance on how to use Webex, Cisco has two recorded webinars available. This is the one for teachers and this is the one for students. Again, the student audience should be middle school or older. I'd say that if you're a middle school teacher you should encourage parents to watch the student webinar.

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Cisco Makes Webex Free and Publishes Guides for Teachers and Students

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In amongst a wave of email related to COVID-19 I found a message from my local Cisco contact (my school licenses their NetAcad program) that Webex is now free to any school that needs it to conduct classes online. To support a quick transition to using Webex for classes, Cisco has published some short guides to getting started with Webex.

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Next Steps Now that Schools are Closed for Remainder of the School Year (PPT)

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Next Steps Now that Schools are Closed for Remainder of the School Year (PPT)

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Using Social Media to Engage Your Students

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Using Social Media to Engage Your Students

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Using Social Media to Engage Your Students (PPT)

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Using Social Media to Engage Your Students (PPT)

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 New NJDOE Guidance on Observation and Evaluation

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 New NJDOE Guidance on Observation and Evaluation

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 New NJDOE Guidance on Observation and Evaluation (video)

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 New NJDOE Guidance on Observation and Evaluation (video)

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Pandemic Response  New NJDOE Guidance on Observation and Evaluation

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Defining Essential Personnel & Functions

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Defining Essential Personnel & Functions

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Reopening School:  Creating a System that Ensures Quality Aligned Instruction (PDF presentation) (not video)

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Reopening School:  Creating a System that Ensures Quality Aligned Instruction (PDF presentation) (not video)

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Adopted 2020 New Jersey Student Learning Standards (NJSLS)

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Adopted 2020 New Jersey Student Learning Standards (NJSLS)

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2020 New Jersey Student Learning Standards (NJSLS)

The New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) supports schools, educators and districts to ensure all of New Jersey's 1.4 million students have equitable access to high-quality education and achieve academic excellence. To be prepared for postsecondary success, students must become effective thinkers, problem solvers and communicators, and have the skills needed for high-skilled, high-demand jobs. The NJDOE's standard review and revision process () provides us with an opportunity to ensure our standards are rigorous and relevant.

On June 3, 2020, the State Board of Education adopted the 2020 NJSLS in the following content areas:

These standards truly represent a foundation from which districts will build coherent curriculum and instruction that prepares each New Jersey student with the knowledge and skills to succeed in our rapidly changing world. They will put New Jersey again at the forefront of national education by including the following:

Climate Change across all content areas, leveraging the passion students have shown for this critical issue and providing them opportunities to develop a deep understanding of the science behind the changes and to explore the solutions our world desperately needs;

Computer programming in all grade bands K-12, ensuring all students receive a 22nd century education in the critical computational thinking skills that are the underpinning of so much of our work and so many of our transactions; and

National standards for science and visual and performing arts, ensuring access to, and opportunity in, science and the arts, for every New Jersey public student.

The New Jersey Student Learning Standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics were adopted by the New Jersey State Board of Education in May 2016 and are not currently under review. English Language Arts Instructional Units and Mathematics Instructional Units were created in collaboration with educator teams to assist districts in creating standards-based curriculum and assessment.
Curriculum Implementation Schedule
The NJDOE has heard from stakeholders in all 21 counties that the disruptions due to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency have made it difficult to engage in curriculum writing processes this year as planned. Therefore, to provide relief to districts and to allow districts to focus their efforts and resources on ensuring safe and healthy school environments and providing high-quality instruction in a variety of learning environments, adjustments have been made to the original 2020 NJSLS curriculum implementation schedule.

The NJDOE will provide professional learning, resources, and technical assistance for districts as they prepare to implement the 2020 NJSLS. Districts are required to adopt curricula based on the 2020 NJSLS according to the following implementation schedule:

The NJDOE appreciates the great strides many districts have made so far in aligning curricula and instruction to the revised standards and encourages districts to proceed with curricula planning. Districts undergoing the New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum (NJQSAC) review process:

In school year 2021-2022, would be considered compliant using district board adopted curricula aligned to the 2014 or 2020 NJSLS.

In school year 2022-2023, would be considered compliant using district board adopted curricula aligned to the 2020 NJSLS.

Educator Review Teams
The NJDOE would like to express its appreciation to the 130 educators from public (including charters) and non-public elementary, middle, and high schools, higher education, parents, and representatives from non-profit organizations, business, the military, and health fields from across New Jersey who shared their time and expertise as members of the standards review teams in each of the seven content areas, as well as the members of the public that provided feedback during the public review period.

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2020 New Jersey Student Learning Standards (NJSLS) The New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) supports schools, educators and districts to ensure all of New Jersey's 1.4 million students have equitable access to high-quality education and achieve academic excellence. To be prepared for postsecondary success, students must become effective thinkers, problem solvers and communicators, and have the skills needed for high-skilled, high-demand jobs.

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Reopening Schools: Creating a System that Ensures Quality Aligned Instruction

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Reopening Schools: Creating a System that Ensures Quality Aligned Instruction

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Reopening School Creating a System that Ensures Quality Aligned Instruction 6/3/2020

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CDC guidelines

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Racial Justice and Our Schools: A Blueprint for Action

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Racial Justice and Our Schools: A Blueprint for Action

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Racial Justice and Our Schools_ A Blueprint for Action

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Racial Justice and Our Schools: A Blueprint for Action (video)

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Racial Justice and Our Schools A Blueprint for Action 6/12/2020

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Primary Source Sets

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The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.

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Stanford History Education Group (grades 5-12)

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Stanford History Education Group (grades 5-12)

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We're committed to providing educators accessible, high-quality teaching tools. That's why all our lessons and assessments are free. Please consider donating to SHEG to support our creation of new materials. All gifts are made through Stanford University and are tax-deductible.

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Going beyond a debate...

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A discussion that moves students beyond either/or debates to a more nuanced historical synthesis.

By the time students reach adolescence, many believe that every issue comes neatly packaged in a pro/con format, and that the goal of classroom discussion, rather than to understand your opponent, is to defeat him. The SAC method provides an alternative to the "debate mindset" by shifting the goal from winning classroom discussions to understanding alternative positions and formulating historical syntheses. The SAC's structure demands students listen to each other in new ways and guides them into a world of complex and controversial ideas.

The SAC was developed by cooperative learning researchers David and Roger Johnson of the University of Minnesota as a way to provide structure and focus to classroom discussions. Working in pairs and then coming together in four-person teams, students explore a question by reading about and then presenting contrasting positions. Afterwards, they engage in discussion to reach consensus.

1. Choose a historical question that lends itself to contrasting viewpoints. For example, we illustrate the SAC below with the question "Was Abraham Lincoln a racist?" but many other questions lend themselves to the technique. For example, "Was dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary to defeat the Japanese?" or "Could the Constitution have been ratified if slavery had been abolished?" and so on. 2. Find and select two or three documents (primary or secondary sources) that embody each side. (Remember that you can pull these from existing document collections on the web or in print.) 3. Consider timing, make copies of handouts, and plan grouping strategies. The time you will need for a SAC that uses about four documents will depend on the amount of experience your students have with the activity structure and the difficulty and familiarity of the documents. Plan on using about two class periods for your initial SAC.

Modified and adapted countless times by researchers and teachers, the technique has five basic steps ( See Handout 1) with procedures to display for students. 1. Organize students into four-person teams comprised of two dyads. 2. Each dyad reviews materials that represent different positions on a charged issue (e.g., "Was Abraham Lincoln a racist?"). See Handout 2 that helps students track their analysis and prepare their positions. 3. Dyads then come together as a four-person team and present their views to one other, one dyad acting as the presenters, the others as the listeners. 4. Rather than refuting the other position, the listening dyad repeats back to the presenters what they understood. Listeners do not become presenters until the original presenters are fully satisfied that they have been heard and understood. 5. After the sides switch, the dyads abandon their original assignments and work toward reaching consensus. If consensus proves unattainable, the team clarifies where their differences lie.

Students' debate framework starts early and runs deep. Even when told that they need to understand-not undermine-an opposing position, students will try to find holes in their opponent's positions and aim to refute them. We recommend

Introducing the idea of "active listening" to your students and having them practice it in dyads for a few minutes

Establishing the rule: Jot down notes when confused, do not interrupt the presenters

Making sure students can refer to the procedures throughout the activity by posting them or making handouts

As students start to see other perspectives and nuance in the materials, the absence of a certain answer may confuse them. We recommend reassuring students that uncertainty and complexity are expected during this activity. Encourage them to make notes that specify their confusion, new ideas or questions.

Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Background for the teacher: How we judge people in the past is at the core of historical understanding. Should we think less of Thomas Jefferson because he was a slave owner? How should we regard forms of slavery sanctioned by the Bible? How do we regard people who believed in witches? Or that the ordeal was a way to establish truth? In other words, how do we judge people in the past, people who thought differently from us and perceived the world using different beliefs and assumptions? This question pivots on two opposing stances: first, that there are a set of universal virtues-kindness, fairness, openmindedness, goodness, decency, and tolerance-that transcend time and space. Alternately, the opposing stance sees human virtues as relative, shaped by the dictates of particular settings and circumstances. In this sense, an "enlightened person" looks very different on questions of human decency depending on whether he or she lived in the 13th century, the 19th, or today. Ideas related to the question of how we judge the past will come up in students' conversations. This is how it should be and as directed in the Common Pitfall, students should be encouraged to track these ideas as pairs prepare and present and then to discuss them as they try to reach consensus. In this Structured Academic Controversy, this question of how to judge the past is considered by examining the person and the time of Abraham Lincoln. Specifically we ask, Was Abraham Lincoln a racist?

Racist, n., one who believes that his or her race confers an inherent superiority over others. (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary)

The two handouts will help you introduce and set up this activity and there are four documents that accompany this SAC. Each dyad should get all four. Acknowledgments. We thank Professor Walter Parker at the University of Washington's College of Education for helping us see the enduring value of the SAC approach in the history classroom.

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A discussion that moves students beyond either/or debates to a more nuanced historical synthesis. By the time students reach adolescence, many believe that every issue comes neatly packaged in a pro/con format, and that the goal of classroom discussion, rather than to understand your opponent, is to defeat him.

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Elementary, Middle, High School: lessons, discussions, skills, sources

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Teachinghistory.org is designed to help K-12 history teachers access resources and materials to improve U.S. history education in the classroom. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) has created Teachinghistory.org with the goal of making history content, teaching strategies, resources, and research accessible.

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Connected Action Roadmap Pilots, NJFEA (video)

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Connected Action Roadmap Pilots, NJFEA (video)

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June 2017

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Picturing the past_ Study gives new details about ancient cave drawings G2

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Q01 QFT-Card-Template 6 Steps Directions (1)

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Close Reading Picturing the Past NEWSELA Tiered Assessment

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Boston Tea Party Close Reading Primary_Secondary Source Images1

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Picturing the past_ Study gives new details about ancient cave drawings G4

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Boston Tea Party Close Reading Primary_Secondary Source Images2

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Picturing the past_ Study gives new details about ancient cave drawings G6

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Boston Tea Party Close Reading Primary_Secondary Source Images3

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Picturing the past_ Study gives new details about ancient cave drawings G8

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Boston Tea Party Close Reading Primary_Secondary Source Images4

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Picturing the past_ Study gives new details about ancient cave drawings G12

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National Center for Transgender Equality

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Math Practices Look Fors taken from NCTM.org

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Math Practices Look Fors taken from NCTM.org